The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

Summary

A revolution is under way.

In recent years, Google's autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM's Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies-with hardware, software, and networks at their core-will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human.

In The Second Machine Age, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee-two thinkers at the forefront of their field-reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives.

Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kinds-from lawyers to truck drivers-will be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.

Drawing on years of research and up-to-the-minute trends, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies for survival and offer a new path to prosperity. These include revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity, and embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed landscape.

A fundamentally optimistic audiobook, The Second Machine Age will alter how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress.

Reviews

The purpose of the book is to talk about how machines are and will change our lifestyle in the coming years. With Internet of Things being on the rise, I do see things change very drastically (in a positive way) for us very soon. I was impressed by the 'second half of the chessboard' analogy. I could relate to it being in the technology field myself.The authors hint at improving productivity - throughput per worker - in the early chapters as a means of achieving this. Higher levels of computation, digitization, and recombinant innovation are the tools that are making these breakthroughs happen.They do place an emphasis on better learning techniques, both in school and after. A mention of MOOCs and the way students can make the most of it was definitely a revival for me as I've read it earlier in other books.Few of things mentioned in the book that the authors think as 'wonders of the future' are actually happening right now, but that could be my timing of reading the book.

The Second Machine Age is a great book to understand how technology will make rapid inroads into areas previously thought as a human preserve. From chess to driving to personal assistant, computers prove increasingly capable of complex tasks, and the exponential increase of computing power means that future breakthrough will be even more impressive and come much sooner than our linear-biased minds expect. The book shows that this evolution has deep consequences on the very fabric of society, in the amount ("bounty") and distribution ("spread") of economic outcomes. Left to its own devices, current technological progress increases production at a fast pace, but inequality of outcomes at an even faster pace, leading to grim prospects for middle-income jobs. The authors, however, do not subscribe to the view that such a future is unavoidable (see Tyler Cowen's Average is over) and present an array of measure that enable the majority of us not to race against the machines (title of their previous book on the subject), but with them.Overall, it is a deep, well-researched book. Readers of Race against the machine will not find lots of new elements, but the exposition of the material is better structured. In my opinion, this book should be complemented by another one, dealing with how technology affects and is affected by culture (norms, representation, social relations) and not just economic outcomes.

In all, a very good and informative read, although the key ideas are not new to readers of Jeremy Rifkin's 1994 book "The End of Work", which, unfortunately, is not mentioned.

I especially liked the argument that "growth" is increasingly inadequately captured by GDP growth, and the point that the present fiscal system is too much labor-oriented. In general, the diagnosis was excellent. The solutions outlined by the authors, however, were much too short-term in my eyes. Especially since the authors stress that we are at an "inflection point" of history, focusing on quick fixes of the status quo (better education etc) is a little myopic. We need to be prepared for a largely laborless society within our lifetimes, which will require huge changes in the distribution of income, as the authors themselves acknowledge. This big transition will take a lot of time, so it must be started now. The authors were too light on outlining the long-term solutions. For example, how are governments going to finance negative income taxes for the legions on un(der)employed, and the necessary investments in science and infrastructure? I would have liked more detailed visions on the solutions for the "android experiment".

Lastly, for a book about technology, the ebook version is funny in that the final 15% consist of a (completely useless because the keywords are unlinked) index; it's also highly misleading as the main text already ends at 67% of the ebook. In general, the book makes the impression that it could have used another round of editing.

This book is great because it surveys the real advances of digital technology across areas of the world economy and its impact on laboring people. It also explains the characteristics of technology by highlighting its exponential aspects (Moore's law and the other half of the chess board) and its combinatorial character through merging devices and networks. Overall the book is a good primer to what's happened in the last 40-50 years of economic change in the United States, and in turn the world.

The authors wrote this book as a follow-on their previous book about technology and the economy, "Race against the Machine," which I found very thought provoking. In The Second Machine Age, they look at how things once considered un-automatable like driving and medicine may well not be and how that will affect the economy. I've read a lot about driver-less cars by Google (and others) and can't wait until I can either work or sleep in my car while it takes me where I need to go. What I had not given much thought to was how this will affect the economy. In this book, the authors explore some of the consequences if jobs like long-distance trucker are no longer ones done by humans. So too, in medicine where now there are interesting developments with IBM's Watson technology being used to diagnose patients. How will that affect doctors and the healthcare field as a whole? At one level, these are not immediate concerns, but at the same time the technology is moving very quickly and will have consequences for all of us. This book is well worth reading for anyone who likes to think about future technology and how it will affect us.

How has technology affected human culture and economics? How will the rapid progress of digital technology do so in the future? These are the questions this book attempts to answer, albeit not in any great depth. Primarily it's about the economic impact of increased productivity due to automation. It highlights some likely challenges ahead (such as unemployment and the growing spread in wealth between capital owners and people who work for a living), and it offers suggestions on how those can be met. I can't say it brings up any major points I have not thought of before, and my only real disappointment in this book is that it offers nothing truly bold, insightful, or innovative. Still, it is a good read. I recommend it.

What a leftist hogwash!The authors make two assertions: 1) In the long run machines will become so smart that they can handle almost every tasks which until now required human input. 2) Because of so many machines doing so many tasks prices of all things will fall dramatically, will tend even to zero!All right so far. But suddenly a deep red Marxist jumps up and says: "The more machines doing these tasks the more profits will accrue to capitalists!" Why this Marxist is so red? Well, he is unable to uphold this nonsense, because when all products are getting cheaper every year how should it possible for capitalists to claim even higher profits?The authors don't bother about that very long. For them it's important to conclude further: "In this coming second machine age we need a compensation for the expected masses of unemployed!" And this is supposedly the gist of the matter: Write some alluring lines that my fellow-socialists can believe that it is necessary to 1) print even more money and 2) use it for an unconditional basic income for all!Hallelujah!

I work in IT and have spent most of my career working to stay ahead of the awesome creative destruction that pretty much defines the industry. This book rang true.

The authors set out to give the lay of the land - and do so quite well - and then compare it to previous bursts of innovation (industrial revolution, electricity). They build a compelling case for what is yet to come and back up their conclusions with mountains of data.

There's a lot of optimism about what the future of technology looks like. There's a lot of hard news for people whose job can be easily replaced by a machine. And there's a lot of advice for how we can best prepare.

If this book was written in the late 18th century, it would tell us that our career as a field laborer might not be the best option, but that now would be an excellent time to invest in steam engines and railroad stock.

If you're already in the workforce, this book will give you a valuable glimpse of what is coming. If you're in high school and are taking the important first steps of the rest of your life, drop what you're doing and buy this book right now. It may well change your life.

The best version of the techno-optimistic case, The Second Machine Age is about machines that replace cognitive tasks, after the first machine age developed machines that replaced physical tasks. Eric Brynjolffson and Andrew McAfee discuss the conditions they believe will lead to ever faster technological change, specifically Moore's law for hardware, costless replicability of digital information and recombination of ideas. They are optimistic about everything from Google's self-driving cars to IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer Watson. And they believe that these manifest themselves in "the bounty" (i.e., growth) and "the spread" (i.e., inequality), with a particular fear that inequality could manifest itself as large-scale joblessness as robots take all the jobs. Ultimately their policy prescriptions are relatively standard, including more education and a tax system that rewards work--and maybe even a full-fledged negative income tax. I would recommend reading this in conjunction with the other side of the argument, best captured by Robert Gordon in his recent papers.